Author

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

From Mark Haddon

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

From Mark Haddon

I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.

From Mark Haddon

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

From Mark Haddon

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

From Mark Haddon

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

From Mark Haddon

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

From Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

From Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Stella Young

Helen Dunmore

Louis Sachar

David Walliams

Friedrich Nietzsche

Authors with Opposing Views

Irvine Welsh

Janet Fitch

Jerry Spinelli

Matt Haig

Abraham Polonsky